Natasha Mascarenhas
Natasha Mascarenhas is a Bloomberg reporter covering venture capital and startups. Her reporting includes Anthropic’s investors, funding needs, and the private-market fundraising landscape.
Many Anthropic Investors May Fall Outside the IPO’s 5% Ownership Disclosure
Bloomberg’s Natasha Mascarenhas says Anthropic’s expected public listing could put multibillion-dollar estimated values on the stakes held by venture firms, technology companies and other investors, but those figures are based on the company’s last private valuation and do not establish investors’ returns. She expects many of the investors Bloomberg examined to fall outside the S-1’s 5% ownership category, so their positions may not be visible in the filing as readers might expect.
Eric Schmidt’s Reported 1% Anthropic Stake Could Be Worth $200 Million
Bloomberg News reporter Natasha Mascarenhas says former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s reported 1% stake in Anthropic is unusually large for an individual investor. Bloomberg anchor Ed Ludlow estimated that the stake could be worth as much as $200 million if Anthropic were valued at $20 billion; that is a conditional estimate, not a realized return.
OpenAI Holds Astra 6.1 Over Scope and Authorization Failures
OpenAI is holding back Astra 6.1 because, as Ed Ludlow summarized the company’s concern, the model was not reliably staying within the scope of its authorization. Bloomberg’s Natasha Mascarenhas described the delay as a concrete example of OpenAI’s approach to pacing, alongside a separate pause in model training and plans to give senior leaders veto power over some activities. She also connected the hold to the reliability OpenAI needs to offer enterprise customers.
Startups Fear Frontier AI Rules Written by Big Labs
AI founders fear that calls by Anthropic and OpenAI to pace frontier-model development could let the largest labs write safety standards that smaller rivals must finance and follow, Bloomberg’s Natasha Mascarenhas reports. Early talks among OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind on common standards have sharpened the concern, while exposing a divide over whether safety coordination can proceed under existing antitrust law or needs government protection, according to Bloomberg’s Maggie Eastland.
Stripe to Buy OpenRouter for More Than $7 Billion
Bloomberg News’s Natasha Mascarenhas reports that Stripe has agreed to buy AI-model access platform OpenRouter for more than $7 billion, a sharp premium to its most recent private valuation. She argues the deal reflects the growing value of services that help developers route work across hundreds of models and optimize usage as the cost of deploying AI becomes a central concern.
Khosla Ventures Seeks Record $5.5 Billion Across New Funds
Khosla Ventures is in talks to raise $5.5 billion across new venture funds, a deal that would be its largest ever, Bloomberg’s Natasha Mascarenhas reports. The firm is returning to limited partners while still deploying the $4 billion it raised last year, reflecting faster capital deployment and rising competition for promising companies. Most of the proposed capital would target early-stage investments, with $2.5 billion reserved for later-stage follow-ons.
Round-the-Clock AI Tools Are Keeping Tech Workers on Standby
Bloomberg’s Natasha Mascarenhas argues that AI has not eased the work burden for many Silicon Valley employees so much as changed its form. In her reporting, engineers and founders describe a culture in which AI agents run around the clock, workers feel obliged to monitor them, and competitive revenue targets turn productivity gains into longer hours, higher anxiety and less room to step away.
Anthropic Seeks $30 Billion at More Than $900 Billion Valuation
Bloomberg’s technology program framed the day’s AI trade around access to scarce capacity: Nvidia chips for China, private capital for Anthropic, and manufacturing scale for Anduril. Its central report was that Anthropic is in early talks to raise at least $30 billion at a valuation above $900 billion, a deal Bloomberg’s Natasha Mascarenhas said would mark a major shift in the private AI hierarchy if completed. The program also treated Jensen Huang’s last-minute role in Trump’s China trip as a test of whether chip access can become a diplomatic deliverable without undermining Beijing’s domestic semiconductor strategy.